From: The Baileys (nanotech@cwix.com)
Date: Sat Nov 28 1998 - 17:12:18 MST
John Clark wrote:
>Sometimes for various reasons the weight of the brain of famous people
>was measured immediately after their death and recorded. The brain of
>the average adult male weighs 3 LB 2.2 oz. Einstein's brain was about
>average size, the same was true of Gauss, one of the two or three
>greatest mathematicians who ever lived. Ironically the brain of Franz
>Gall (1828) the founder of phrenology which maintained that you could
>tell everything about a person by the size and shape of their head
>turned out to have a small brain, only 2 LB 10.3 oz.
My guess is that intelligence quotients are tied more closely to the density
and number of connections within the brain instead of sheer brain mass.
Whale brains are considerably heavier than human brains but the number of
neurons in a whale brain is sigificantly less than that of a human's. I
have not been able to identify any scanning technology that allows a
determination of connection density, or even neuronal density except
posthumously.
Here's some more estimates to throw into the "how smart was that person?"
raffle:
The source of these estimates is Catherine Cox's 1926 book _The Early Mental
Traits of Three Hundred Geniuses_. As cited in SciAm's Intelligence folio.
Sir Francis Galton 200
Goethe 185
Voltaire 170
Tennyson 155
Wordsworth 150
Byron 150
Copernicus 105
Doug Bailey
doug.bailey@ey.com
nanotech@cwix.com
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